Trashing Africa

Blair
Has Ensured that Europe and the US

Will
Continue to Promote Famine

by
George Monbiot

Dissident Voice

June
3, 2003

Perhaps
the defining moment of Tony Blair's premiership was the speech he gave to the
Labour Party conference in October 2001. In June, his party had returned to
office with a monumental majority. In September, two planes were flown into the
World Trade Centre in New York. The speech appeared to mark his transition from
the insecure, focus-group junkie of Labour's first term, to a visionary and a
statesman, determined to change the world.

The
most memorable passage was his declaration on Africa. "The state of
Africa," he told us, "is a scar on the conscience of the world. But
if the world as a community focused on it, we could heal it. And if we don't,
it will become deeper and angrier." [1] This being
so, I would respectfully ask our visionary prime minister to explain what the
hell he thinks he is doing in France.

A
few weeks ago, President Chirac did something unprecedented. The head of the
state which had formerly prevented any real change to Europe's farm subsidy
regime suddenly gave ground. He wanted to show that the G8 summit he is hosting
in Evian, which concludes today, would offer something other than just the
usual spectacle of the rich and powerful deciding how they would make
themselves still richer and more powerful. He approached the US government to
suggest that Europe would stop subsidising its exports of food to Africa if
America did the same.

His
offer was significant, not only because it represented a major policy reversal
for France, but also because it provided an opportunity to abandon the
perpetual agricultural arms race between the EU and the US, in which each side
seeks to out-subsidise the other.

Our
farm subsidies, as Tony Blair has pointed out, are a disaster for the
developing world, and particularly for Africa. Farming accounts for some 70% of
employment on that continent, and most of the farmers there are desperately
poor. Part of the reason is that they are unfairly undercut by the subsidised
products dumped on their markets by exporters from the US and the European
Union. Chirac's proposals addressed only part of the problem, but they could
have begun the process of dismantling the system which does so much harm to our
pockets, our environment, and the lives of some of the world's most vulnerable
people.

We
might, then, have expected Tony Blair, who created a major diplomatic incident
last year when he rightly savaged Chirac for refusing to budge, to have
welcomed the lost and heavily-subsidised sheep into the free market fold. But
our prime minister, instead, has single-handedly destroyed the French
initiative. The reason will by now be familiar. George Bush, who receives substantial
political support from US agro-industrialists, grain exporters and pesticide
manufacturers, was not prepared to make the concessions required to match
Chirac's offer. Had the European Union, and in particular the member which
claims to act as a bridge across the Atlantic, supported France, the moral
pressure on Bush may well have become irresistible. But as soon as Blair made
it clear that he would not back Chirac's plan, the initiative was dead.

So,
thanks to our conscience-stricken prime minister, and his statesmanlike habit
of doing whatever George Bush tells him to, Africa is now well and truly
stuffed. Every trade distortion Blair once promised to address remains in
place. Several of the food crises from which that continent is now suffering are
directly exacerbated by the plight of its own farmers.

The
underlying problem is that the rich nations set the global trade rules. The
current world trade agreement was supposed to have prevented the EU and the US
from subsidising their exports to developing nations. But, as Oxfam has shown,
the agreement contains so many loopholes that it permits the two big players
simply to call their export subsidies by a different name. [2]

So,
for example, the European Union has, in several farm sectors, stopped paying
farmers according to the amount they produce (which is classified by the World
Trade Organisation as a "trade-distorting" subsidy) and started
instead to give them direct grants, based on the amount of land they own and
how much they produced there in the past. The effect on the prices of the crops
they grow is almost identical, but the new subsidies are now classified as
"non-distorting".

The
US has applied the same formula, and added a couple of tricks of its own. One
of these is called "export credit": the state reduces the cost of US
exports by providing cheap insurance for the exporters. These credits, against
which Chirac was hoping to trade the European subsidies, are worth some $7.7bn
to US grain sellers. In combination with other ruses, they ensure that American
exporters can undercut the world price for wheat and maize by between 10 and
16%, and the world price for cotton by 40%. [3]

But
the ugliest of its hidden export subsidies is its use of aid as a means of
penetrating the markets of poorer nations. While the other major donors provide
food aid in the form of money, which the World Food Programme can use to buy
supplies in local markets, thus helping indigenous farmers while feeding the
starving, the US insists on sending its own produce. This programme, the
government states with breathtaking frankness, is "designed to develop and
expand commercial outlets for US commodities." [4]

The
result is that the major recipients are not the nations in greatest need, but
the nations which can, again in the words of the US Department of Agriculture,
"demonstrate the potential to become commercial markets" for US farm
products. [5] This is why, for example, the Philippines
currently receives more US food aid than Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe
put together, all of which, unlike the Philippines, are currently suffering
from serious food shortages. In a way, this is a blessing for Africa: if the US
dumped as much of its produce on the nations which need it as it does on the
nations which don't, it would destroy their fragile agricultural economy.

But
US policy also ensures that food aid is delivered just when it is needed least.
Oxfam has produced a graph plotting the amount of wheat given to developing
nations by the United States against world prices. When the price falls (in
other words, when there is a global surplus and poor nations can buy food
cheaply) the volume of "aid" rises. [6] This is
as clear a demonstration of agricultural dumping as you could ask for. The very
programme which is meant to help the poor is in fact undermining them. It casts
an interesting light on Bob Geldof's astonishing claim last week that George
Bush has become the champion of the poor.

So,
when faced with a choice between saving Africa and saving George Bush from a
mild diplomatic embarrassment, Blair has, as we could have predicted, done as
his master bids. The scar on the conscience of the world has just become deeper
and angrier.

George Monbiotis Honorary
Professor at the Department of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the
Department of Environmental Science at the University of East London. He writes
a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper of London. The Age of Consent, George Monbiot's proposals
for global democratic governance, will be published in June. His articles and
contact info can be found at his website:www.monbiot.com

References:

1.
Tony Blair, 2001. The Power of Community Can Change the World. Speech to the
Labour Party conference, Brighton.

2.
Kevin Watkins, head of research, Oxfam Great Britain, 2003. Northern
Agricultural Policies and World Poverty: will the Doha ‘Development Round’ Make
a Difference? Paper presented to the Annual Bank Conference of Development
Economics, 15th-16th May 2003